Amplitude alternatives: five product analytics tools by event volume

Why teams leave Amplitude

The cleanest way to read Amplitude's pricing is as a ladder with a cliff in the middle. Free gives 2M events a month, "forever", with no credit card. Plus "starts at $0" with the first 2M events free and scales "up to 70M events", but the page text does not list the per-event rate beyond the first 2M; it points to an "Estimate bill" link and requires a credit card. Growth and Enterprise are both "Custom, event based pricing" with a Contact sales button, so a team that outgrows Plus has no published number to budget against.

The second reason is where features sit. Plus lists custom events and formulas, 20 behavioral cohorts, alerts, heatmaps and 2-year data retention. SSO and project permissions appear on Growth (with 20K monthly session replays), and data access controls, RBAC and 50K monthly session replays on Enterprise. A team that needs SSO for a security review therefore has to leave the self-serve plans. Session replay is capped per month on every tier: 10K on Free, 20K on Growth, 50K on Enterprise.

The third reason is simply fit. Amplitude's page positions the platform as analytics plus experimentation, guides and surveys and activation. If you only want funnels and retention at a predictable price, a lighter tool can be cheaper to run.

What Amplitude costs at 1.5M, 3M and 10M events

At 1.5M events a month you are inside the Free allowance: $0. At 3M events a month you are on Plus, and Amplitude's page does not state the per-event rate for the 1M events above the free 2M, so the only honest number is $0 for the first 2M and "estimate on request" for the rest. At 10M events you are still inside the 70M ceiling that Plus advertises, with the same unlisted rate. For comparison on volumes that matter to budgets: Mixpanel's page shows $120 a month on annual billing at the 1.5M-event slider stop, and PostHog's tier table prices 3M anonymous events at 1,000,000 x $0.00005 + 1,000,000 x $0.0000343 = $84.30.

Amplitude also offers a start-up route: "Startups with under $10M in funding and fewer than 20 employees receive one free year on our Growth plan." If you qualify, the Growth features including SSO are free for 12 months, which changes the comparison for a seed-stage SaaS.

What to keep Amplitude for

Two things on the page are hard to beat for a small team. "Every plan includes the full platform and unlimited seats", so there is no per-seat tax on product managers, designers and support staff who want to look at a chart. And the Free plan's 2M events a month is double Mixpanel's 1M and well above the 1M analytics events in PostHog's free tier, so a SaaS product with a few thousand active users can stay free for a long time.

Stay if you are under 2M events, if you use Amplitude's experimentation or guides and surveys, or if your data model is already built around its event taxonomy. Leave once the quote for Growth arrives and you can compare it against a published price from Mixpanel or a metered one from PostHog.

Free allowance and first paid step, 7 Oct 2026

Read on 7 Oct 2026 from Amplitude, Mixpanel, PostHog, Heap, Pendo and Userpilot. The units differ (events, sessions, monthly active users), so rows are not like-for-like.

Five Amplitude alternatives and who each one is for

1. Mixpanel: the closest like-for-like with a public price

Mixpanel's Free plan covers up to 1M events a month with unlimited seats, 10K session replays and funnels and retention analysis. Growth is "$120 / month" on annual billing and "$140 with monthly plan", with the first 1M events free and volume up to 20M events a month chosen on a slider; the page shows $120 at the 1.5M-event stop with annual billing selected. Enterprise runs up to 1T events and is "Contact Sales".

One product difference from the page: Mixpanel's Growth card lists 5k MEU a month, up to 500K session replays a month and up to 50 active feature flags, which are meters separate from the event count. Mixpanel's Startup Program offers the first year free to companies founded less than 5 years ago with up to $8M in funding.

Trade-off: Its free event allowance is half of Amplitude's, and the slider stops above the one I read are not quoted here, so a 3M-event bill is not stated.

2. PostHog: usage-based pricing and an open-source option

PostHog bills each product separately with a monthly free allowance on every one: 1M analytics events, 5K session recordings, 1M feature flag requests, 100K exceptions, 1,500 survey responses and 1M data warehouse rows. Its pay-as-you-go plan has "no minimums or annual commitments", and billing limits can be set per product. Retention is 1 year on free and 7 years on any paid plan, and the MIT-licensed open-source edition is an option if you want to run it yourself. Cloud regions are US (Virginia) and EU (Frankfurt).

The math is tiered and has two parts. All events pay a base rate ($0.00005 per event for 1-2M, $0.0000343 for 2-15M). Events from identified users also pay a person-profile rate ($0.000198 per event for 1-2M, $0.0000697 for 2-15M, first million free). At 3M events a month, all anonymous, that is $84.30; if every event were from an identified user it would be $84.30 + (1,000,000 x $0.000198) + (1,000,000 x $0.0000697) = $352.00.

Trade-off: Identified-user traffic costs several times more than anonymous traffic per event, so a logged-in SaaS product should price its volume with the calculator rather than the headline rate.

3. Heap: autocapture without up-front event naming

Heap's Free plan is "Up to 10k monthly sessions" with 6 months of history and 1 project. Growth adds unlimited users and reports, 12 months of history, CSV exports and email support but has no list price; the page says "Sign up and install the free snippet to get an estimate!". Pro adds account analytics, an engagement matrix and report alerts, with Session Replay as an add-on, and Premier adds warehouse integration, behavioral targeting, unlimited projects and region-specific storage. Both Pro and Premier use "Custom Session Pricing".

The pricing unit is a session, and on web a session ends after 30 minutes of pageview inactivity. When you exceed your plan's monthly limit Heap emails you to upgrade to the next tier. Heap is part of the Contentsquare group, according to its pricing page.

Trade-off: Sessions, not events, drive the bill, and no price is published for the paid tiers, so a quote is the only way to budget.

4. Pendo: analytics plus in-app guides in one contract

Pendo sells Base (Product Analytics and In-app Guides), Core (adds Session Replay) and Ultimate (adds Sentiment surveys such as NPS, PMF and CSAT, plus Orchestrate, Listen and Data Sync). Pricing is by "Custom MAU volume" and no dollar prices are published. Pendo's page says that when you buy a module you get "full functionality – no gated features, no forced upgrades" and that the incremental cost of more usage decreases as you upgrade.

If your product team currently pairs Amplitude with a separate tool for onboarding tooltips and surveys, Pendo is the option that merges them. If you only need charts, you will pay for modules you do not use.

Trade-off: No public prices and no free plan are listed, so it is the slowest option to evaluate and is aimed at larger teams.

5. Userpilot: in-app engagement first, analytics second

Userpilot prices by monthly active users. Starter is $299 a month and covers up to 2,000 monthly active users with in-app engagement, user segmentation and an NPS survey. Growth starts from $849 a month and adds advanced product analytics, event autocapture, a resource center and 100K free emails a month. Enterprise adds mobile engagement, premium CRM integrations, data warehouse sync and a custom contract and SLA. The page lists SOC 2 Type 2, HIPAA and GDPR.

Compared with Amplitude's free 2M events, the entry price is far higher, so it fits a team that wants onboarding flows and analytics in one product rather than a team that only wants charts.

Trade-off: Advanced analytics sit on the Growth tier from $849 a month, which is a large jump from a free Amplitude plan.

Moving off Amplitude: exporting events and running in parallel

Amplitude's Export API documentation and PostHog's managed migrations page were the docs used for the steps below, read on 7 Oct 2026.

1. Decide whether you need history. The Export API returns raw event data as a zipped archive of JSON files, one event object per line, so it carries events, not your saved charts or dashboards. Screenshot or write down the charts you rely on, because they will need to be rebuilt.
2. Export in windows. The docs say the request is a GET to /api/2/export with start and end hours in YYYYMMDDTHH format, authenticated with your API key and secret key, a maximum of 365 days per query, and a 4GB cap that returns a 400 if exceeded. For an hour larger than 4GB the docs recommend the Amazon S3 export instead. EU projects use the analytics.eu.amplitude.com host.
3. Allow for the lag. The docs state data is available to export within 2 hours of when Amplitude's servers received it, so a cut-off export taken at midnight will miss the last couple of hours.
4. If you are moving to PostHog, its docs describe managed migrations that import from Amplitude with your credentials or from JSONL files in S3. They need a paid product analytics plan, set historical_migration to true for you, do not deduplicate events if you run the same migration twice, and recommend a test batch in a test project first.
5. Dual-send new events for a few weeks. Add the second tool's SDK next to Amplitude's (or fan out through a customer data pipeline) and compare weekly active users and your top three funnels in both before you trust the new one.
6. Cut over and cancel. Point dashboards to the new tool, rebuild SSO or permissions, and keep the exported archive for as long as your retention policy needs. On a paid Plus or Growth plan, note the renewal date before downgrading.

Which one to pick

• Stay on Amplitude Free or Plus if you are below 2M events a month, need unlimited seats, or qualify for the one free year of Growth under the start-up scholarship.
• Pick Mixpanel if you want a published monthly price and a similar funnels, retention and session replay product: $120 a month on annual billing at the 1.5M-event slider stop.
• Pick PostHog if you want to pay per event with billing limits, keep data for up to 7 years on paid plans, or self-host the open-source edition.
• Pick Heap if your team does not want to maintain an event spec and can live with session-based pricing and a quote.
• Pick Pendo or Userpilot if tooltips, checklists and surveys are as important to your product team as charts, and be ready to talk to sales or pay from $299 a month.

Related reading: All alternatives pages, Mixpanel vs Amplitude, PostHog vs Amplitude, Product analytics tools, Analytics stack for SaaS, Product analytics best practices.